Jim Donaldson: Overachieving Bryant lacrosse team is bound for NCAAs

SMITHFIELD — There’s a lot of things you can say about the Bryant University lacrosse team.You can say they’re the first team since Bryant moved up to the Division I level to qualify for an NCAA tournament.After...

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Posted May. 7, 2013 @ 9:36 pm

SMITHFIELD — There’s a lot of things you can say about the Bryant University lacrosse team.

You can say they’re the first team since Bryant moved up to the Division I level to qualify for an NCAA tournament.

After which, you can say wholeheartedly: “Congratulations!”

The laxers’ late-season surge to the Northeast Conference regular-season and tournament titles caps an incredible athletic year at Bryant, where the basketball team made a turnaround that captured national attention and the NEC-leading baseball team had a 19-game winning streak this spring.

But there are some people who might say that the Bryant lacrosse team doesn’t really belong in the NCAA tournament because they have a record of 8-10, played just one team (13th-seed Albany) in the 16-team field — and lost, and also lost one-goal games to both Brown and Providence College, neither of which was an NCAA-caliber team this season.

You also could say that the Bulldogs, as the No. 16 seed, have virtually no chance to win their first-round game Sunday against No. 1 Syracuse in the Carrier Dome.

That said, you might be wise to listen to Bryant coach Mike Pressler, one of the best coaches in the sport.

“We’re on ‘cloud nine’ here,” he said, the day after his Bulldogs learned they’d be matched against the 10-time national champion Orangemen “It’s monumental stuff for us and our program.”

Given what Pressler is doing with the lacrosse program at Bryant, there may someday be a monument erected to him on the Smithfield campus.

After the Bulldogs thumped Robert Morris, 14-7, in Saturday’s NEC championship game, hundreds of students charged on to the field at Bulldog Stadium to celebrate.

“In all of my 31 years in lacrosse, I’ve never seen that,” Pressler said.

No one envisioned the Bulldogs getting to the tournament this year after they stumbled to an 0-7 start in the cold — and sometimes snowy — early season.

“This has been a remarkable season for us, the way we were 0-7 out of the box and turned things around,” Pressler said. “It was pretty grim at that point. But one of the things I love about this group is their resiliency. When we finally won at Stony Brook, in a one-goal game, that turned things around.”

The Bulldogs wound up winning 8 of their last 11 games. They went 4-1 in the NEC and then won the conference tournament, which gave them an automatic qualifying berth in the NCAA tournament.

“That the beauty of the A.Q.,” said Pressler, who is in favor of the NCAA’s decision to expand the tourney field by giving automatic bids to more conferences. “It’s growing our sport. It’s great for the game.”

As for those who — understandably — don’t think the Bryant-Syracuse matchup will be much of a game, here are a few points to ponder.

The Orangemen aren’t unbeatable, even in their intimidating, domed stadium.

They lost their season-opener there to Albany, 16-15, in double overtime and also were upset at home by Hobart, 13-12, last month. They lost at Villanova, which isn’t a tournament team, and eked out one-goal wins over Rutgers and Georgetown, who aren’t in the NCAA field, either.

And then there’s this: Bryant has perhaps the best faceoff man in collegiate lacrosse in sophomore midfielder Kevin Massa, who has named the NEC’s Player of the Year after leading the nation in percentage of faceoffs won — 293 of 411, a dazzling 71.3 percent.

As if that weren’t enough, Massa also broke the NCAA Division I record for ground balls in a season, with 223.

“The great thing about having Kevin Massa,” Pressler said, “is that it’s tough for teams to score against us in bunches because he wins so many faceoffs.”

Ball control will be all-important for the Bulldogs against Syracuse.

“When we have the ball, we have to play smart and take care of it,” said Pressler, who took Duke to the NCAA championship game in 2005 and three times led Ohio Wesleyan to the Division III finals.

Once the Bulldogs have the ball, they have plenty of players who know what to do with it.

Mason Poli is an outstanding long-stick middie. Midfielder Colin Dunster led Bryant with 31 goals and tied for the team lead in points with Shane Morrell. Peter McMahon had 43 points, with a team-high 24 assists, and Alex Zomerfeld scored 42 points on 26 goals and 16 assists. Defensively, Glenn Maiorano is a stalwart and goalie Gunnar Waldt has been playing well.

“We don’t have a lot of ‘big-name’ players because they haven’t been able to make names for themselves because people don’t see us on television,” Pressler said. “But we’ve got some athletes I’d put up against anybody.”

While Syracuse has a roster filled with more highly recruited and better-known players — and, most people would say, more good athletes — that won’t necessarily matter on Sunday night.

“It’s not about who’s the best team,” Pressler said. “It’s about who’s the best team that day. The game could come down to a miraculous save, a ground ball, a rebound, a [shot hitting a] pipe. When we were 0-7, those things were going against us. For us to be successful, we have to have those things.”

Now in his seventh season at Bryant, Pressler has successfully led the Bulldogs from Division II to back-to-back NEC tourney titles and, in the conference’s first year of having an automatic qualifying berth, to the NCAA tournament.

“For Bryant University to be playing in the NCAA tournament at the Division I level is so exciting,” Pressler said.

You can say a lot of things about this Bryant lacrosse team — but that comment just about says it all.